So a while ago I went to a ceremony at the oldest graveyard in town, where they were installing a few more Witness Stones.
The Witness Stones project is about putting in grave markers for all the folks enslaved in this town circa 1730-1814. Maybe 60 people unless they find more records, but the trouble is, we're talking about the kind of people who don't always get recorded.
Unless they get recorded on someone's household inventory. When I heard one of the speakers mention that I was baffled. How do you write down someone's name on an inventory and not think that's weird?
Then again sci-fi writers used to treat robots about the same and the assumption that an Android would be treated as a real person with full rights is a recent development in literature. So if someone says "I won two Android Butlers" it still doesn't sound automatically weird to us, and to someone in the 1700s who was used to treating wives and children as quasi-property, treating someone as 100% property wasn't all that weird to them.
I like the fact that the speakers at the ceremony made a point to say that certain people were born and then enslaved, just to avoid implying that anyone could actually be born as a slave. No sense giving the slavers any slack about their decision, eh?
And more to the point, it emphasizes the words that Thomas Jefferson didn't uphold:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Small wonder that the story that coined the word "robots" was also the first story to feature a Robot Uprising.